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Southern States -- fiction

I've got me a new boyfriend and his name is Rick Gavin. I don't actually know him, but he is the author of the darkly comic debut novel Ranchero, which made me cringe and laugh and scribble "I ♥ Rick" in pink glitter pen on all my notebook covers.

Nick Reid was a cop in Southwest Virginia. Something Happened (it's never explained in the book), and Nick ends up as a repo man down in the Mississippi Delta. One day, Nick and his partner Desmond set off on a routine repo to get payment or take back a flat screen TV from Percy Dwayne Dubois.

"But Percy Dwayne wouldn't give in. No, instead he went all white-trash philosophical and figured that since the world was against him, he might as well fight it. He hit Nick over the head with a fireplace shovel, stole the mint-condition calypso coral–colored 1969 Ranchero that Nick had borrowed from his landlady, and went on a rowdy ride across the Mississippi Delta." *

A nubile co-ed is missing from the same small, rural Mississippi town where another young woman had disappeared twenty-five years earlier—the mystery unsolved, her body never found. So begins Tom Franklin’s stellar novel, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter.

Socially-awkward Larry Ott was 16 years old when Cindy Walker, both beautiful and popular, asked him out on a date. That momentous occasion—at least through Larry’s eyes—was the point when his young life began a downward slide from which it would not recover. Walker was never seen again. Although no evidence was ever found connecting him to the girl’s disappearance, the townspeople unanimously convicted Larry without the benefit of any trial. Shunned and taunted, he became the local pariah.

In Georgia Bottoms, Georgia has a lot on her plate--a mother one appetizer short of being “out to lunch,” an unemployed brother more off the wagon than on, and a series of clandestine lovers scheduled six out of seven nights a week.

Although she’s always been able to juggle her unusual responsibilities, Georgia’s Saturday night man, Eugene Hendrix--who also happens to be the town’s (married) preacher--finds himself riddled with guilt. That guilt, in turn, results in a confession to his wife, Brenda. Eager for retaliation, Brenda demands that Georgia’s secrets be revealed to the entire town…via the church pulpit. Georgia employs her vast feminine wiles to avert a last minute disaster. Her next step is to arrange surreptitious relocation for Eugene (and his family) to another congregation…far, far away.